An autobiographical novel is a novel based on the life of the author. The literary technique is distinguished from an autobiography or memoir by the stipulation of being fiction. A further distancing from real events is sometimes called a semi-autobiographical novel. Of course all authors transform the materials of their lives into art, but these novels purport to tell in novel form the author's own story.

Usually, the author and other characters are given different names. While the events of the author's life are recounted, there is no pretense of neutrality or even truth. The life may be reported the way the author wishes it has been, with enemies more clearly loathsome and triumphs more complete than perhaps they were in real life.

Many first novels, as well as novels about intense, private experiences such as war, family conflict, or sex, are written as autobiographical novels.

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun[?] is a novel about his boyhood, and Crash, about the sexual turn-on of car crashes, he describes as "an autobiographical novel in the sense that it is about my inner life, my imaginative life".

Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu or A Remembrance of Things Past, a seven-volume novel with the famous opening line: "For a long time I used to go to bed early," which continues some 36 pages later:

"And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre".